Eccentric Renaissance

Eccentric Renaissance PDF Author: Charles Barber
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190209003
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Eccentric Renaissance shows how El Greco and two other sixteenth-century Cretan artists, Michael Damaskenos and Georgios Klontzas, actively engaged in a re-casting of the Byzantine tradition of icon painting on the Venetian colony of Crete. In so doing, they created art that articulated a point of view that was shaped outside of and against the hegemonic world of Vasari's account of art history. Building upon their own tradition, they developed a highly original understanding of the icon and explored its power to reconcile Byzantine and Renaissance styles of painting and provide a response to the growing presence of Islam.

Eccentric Renaissance

Eccentric Renaissance PDF Author: Charles Barber
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190209003
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
Eccentric Renaissance shows how El Greco and two other sixteenth-century Cretan artists, Michael Damaskenos and Georgios Klontzas, actively engaged in a re-casting of the Byzantine tradition of icon painting on the Venetian colony of Crete. In so doing, they created art that articulated a point of view that was shaped outside of and against the hegemonic world of Vasari's account of art history. Building upon their own tradition, they developed a highly original understanding of the icon and explored its power to reconcile Byzantine and Renaissance styles of painting and provide a response to the growing presence of Islam.

Eccentric Spaces

Eccentric Spaces PDF Author: Robert Harbison
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262581837
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
The subject is the human imagination—and the mysterious interplay between the imagination and the spaces it has made for itself to live in: gardens, rooms, buildings, streets, museums and maps, fictional topographies, and architectures. The book is a lesson in seeing and sensing the manifold forms created by the mind for its own pleasure. Like all of Robert Harbison's works, Eccentric Spaces is a hybrid, informed by the author's interests in art, architecture, fiction, poetry, landscape, geography, history, and philosophy. The subject is the human imagination—and the mysterious interplay between the imagination and the spaces it has made for itself to live in: gardens, rooms, buildings, streets, museums and maps, fictional topographies, and architectures. The book is a lesson in seeing and sensing the manifold forms created by the mind for its own pleasure. Palaces and haunted houses, Victorian parlors, Renaissance sculpture gardens, factories, hill-towns, ruins, cities, even novels and paintings constructed around such environments—these are the spaces over which the author broods. Brilliantly learned, deliberately remote in form from conventional scholarship, Eccentric Spaces is a magical book, an intellectual adventure, a celebration. Since its original publication in 1977, Eccentric Spaces has had a devoted readership. Now it is available to be discovered by a new generation of readers.

Anachronic Renaissance

Anachronic Renaissance PDF Author: Alexander Nagel
Publisher: Zone Books
ISBN: 1942130341
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
A reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance, examining the complex and layered temporalities of Renaissance images and artifacts. In this widely anticipated book, two leading contemporary art historians offer a subtle and profound reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance. Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood examine the meanings, uses, and effects of chronologies, models of temporality, and notions of originality and repetition in Renaissance images and artifacts. Anachronic Renaissance reveals a web of paths traveled by works and artists—a landscape obscured by art history's disciplinary compulsion to anchor its data securely in time. The buildings, paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and medals discussed were shaped by concerns about authenticity, about reference to prestigious origins and precedents, and about the implications of transposition from one medium to another. Byzantine icons taken to be Early Christian antiquities, the acheiropoieton (or “image made without hands”), the activities of spoliation and citation, differing approaches to art restoration, legends about movable buildings, and forgeries and pastiches: all of these emerge as basic conceptual structures of Renaissance art. Although a work of art does bear witness to the moment of its fabrication, Nagel and Wood argue that it is equally important to understand its temporal instability: how it points away from that moment, backward to a remote ancestral origin, to a prior artifact or image, even to an origin outside of time, in divinity. This book is not the story about the Renaissance, nor is it just a story. It imagines the infrastructure of many possible stories.

Walter Pater: an Imaginative Sense of Fact

Walter Pater: an Imaginative Sense of Fact PDF Author: Philip Dodd
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135780234
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
First Published in 1981. Pater is certainly the least widely read and understood of any of the Victorian critics and creative writers, though there are signs of a coming revival of interest in him. Each of the discussions included in this issue devoted to Pater touches, in some significant way, on his "imaginative sense of fact," on his struggle with the objective ‘givens’ of experience (ideas or individuals), and on his efforts to co-opt or turn that Other into a reordered reflection of his own image.

Born Under Saturn

Born Under Saturn PDF Author: Rudolf Wittkower
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590172131
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
A rare art history classic that The New York Times calls a “delightful, scholarly and gossipy romp through the character and conduct of artists from antiquity to the French Revolution.” Born Under Saturn is a classic work of scholarship written with a light and winning touch. Margot and Rudolf Wittkower explore the history of the familiar idea that artistic inspiration is a form of madness, a madness directly expressed in artists’ unhappy and eccentric lives. This idea of the alienated artist, the Wittkowers demonstrate, comes into its own in the Renaissance, as part of the new bid by visual artists to distinguish themselves from craftsmen, with whom they were then lumped together. Where the skilled artisan had worked under the sign of light-fingered Mercury, the ambitious artist identified himself with the mysterious and brooding Saturn. Alienation, in effect, was a rung by which artists sought to climb the social ladder. As to the reputed madness of artists—well, some have been as mad as hatters, some as tough-minded as the shrewdest businessmen, and many others wildly and willfully eccentric but hardly crazy. What is certain is that no book presents such a splendid compendium of information about artists’ lives, from the early Renaissance to the beginning of the Romantic era, as Born Under Saturn. The Wittkowers have read everything and have countless anecdotes to relate: about artists famous and infamous; about suicide, celibacy, wantonness, weird hobbies, and whatnot. These make Born Under Saturn a comprehensive, quirky, and endlessly diverting resource for students of history and lovers of the arts. “This book is fascinating to read because of the abundant quotations which bring to life so many remarkable individuals.”–The New York Review of Books

Ultra-talk

Ultra-talk PDF Author: David Kirby
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820329086
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
In Ultra-Talk, David Kirby poses a simple question: What makes a cultural phenomenon truly great? Exploring a wide variety of "king-sized cultural monuments," Kirby argues that one qualification for greatness is that a phenomenon be embraced by both the elite and the general public. Further, he argues, it must be embraced repeatedly over time. Kirby turns his critical eye to subjects that have been studied and written about, sought after avidly, discussed passionately, and even resisted vigorously around the world. Auto racing, Dante, folk music, food, Leonardo da Vinci, films, poetry, religion, striptease, television, and the internet are just some of the topics he examines. In Rome, heads of state kneel before Bernini's statue of Saint Teresa in ecstasy, says Kirby, and so do people who can't read. And everyone watches TV. Ultra-Talk pays homage to the work of two towering writers and critics. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Giacomo Leopardi both stated that a book was valid only if it had been accepted by both an intellectual elite and a vast public. Kirby would have added a second requirement: that the book's--or cultural monument's--popularity must have traction over time. By standing on the shoulders of Goethe and Leopardi, Kirby offers a way to read, see, and savor a post-theoretical worldview that everybody can share.

A Historian Reads Max Weber

A Historian Reads Max Weber PDF Author: Peter Ghosh
Publisher: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag
ISBN: 9783447057776
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Max Weber's Protestant Ethic is undoubtedly the most widely-read text in Western social theory of the last century. But is it really known? The proposition of this book is that it is not. Innumerable readers will "know" it for their own pedagogic and theoretical purposes, but properly historical grasp of the work's full range of meanings, of its place within the fertile culture of the German states before 1914, and within Max Weber's intellectual biography remains slight. The essays in this volume derive from the author's work in translating and commenting on the Protestant Ethic. They seek (first) to cast light on the range and extent of Weber's intellectual concerns when he was writing in 1904-05: not just English Puritanism, German theology, and capitalism, but also Herrschaft, Judaism, and the shape of Occidental history. This then serves to recapture the continuity and unity of Weber's intellectual development, so that once more we may see the Protestant Ethic at the centre of his oeuvre, the indispensable prelude to all his later work, rather than setting it apart in splendid but curiously lifeless isolation.

The Legends of the Pyramids

The Legends of the Pyramids PDF Author: Jason Colavito
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 1684351502
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Could the Great Pyramid of Giza be a repository of ancient magical knowledge? Or perhaps evidence of a vanished pre–Ice Age civilization? Misinformation and myths have attached themselves to the Egyptian pyramids since ancient Greece and Rome. While many Americans believe that the pyramids were built by aliens, archaeologists understand that the Giza pyramids were built by the pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty around 2450 BCE. So why is there such a disconnect between scholarly opinion and the popular view of Egypt? In The Legends of the Pyramids, Jason Colavito takes us back to Late Antique Egypt, where the replacement of polytheism with Christianity gave rise to local efforts to rewrite the stories of Egyptian history in the image of the Bible. When the Arab conquest absorbed Egypt into the Islamic community, these stories then passed into Islamic historiography and reentered the West. Colavito's The Legends of the Pyramids lays open pop culture's view of Egypt in movies, TV shows, popular books, and New Age beliefs, detailing how the hidden history of Egypt has grown alongside the official history of archaeology and Egyptology.

The Portrait of Eccentricity

The Portrait of Eccentricity PDF Author: Giancarlo Maiorino
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271023205
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
In this companion to his The Cornucopian Mind and the Baroque Unity of the Arts, Maiorino examines the links between Renaissance and the modern versions of the Groteseque. In this interdisciplinary study, the term &"eccentricity&" refers to styles of playful extravagance. Maiorino focuses on the rhetorical figures of excess employed by a critic-historian (Giorgio Vasari), on the willful artificiality of a painter (Giuseppe Arcimboldo), and on the programmatic and interpretive commentary of a theorist (Gregorio Comanini). Maiorino draws subtle and persuasive connections between the images he discusses and the grotesque &"face&" of sixteenth-century poetics and rhetoric. He sets the mannerist and the grotesque against the philosophical seriousness of Renaissance humanism, interpreting them as a celebration of the ludic and fantastic possibilities of art itself. Aiming at pleasure rather than instruction, this art plays on the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, the credible and the impossible, taking delight in parody, excess, disjunction, and exaggeration.

Milton (Routledge Revivals)

Milton (Routledge Revivals) PDF Author: Christopher Kendrick
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317626400
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
First published in 1986, this title critiques the canonical view of Milton as an isolated Great Man, and reassesses the impact of the Puritan Revolution on two of his major works: the Areopagitica and Paradise Lost. The study focuses on the emergence of a discreet ethical framework of thought within the dominant theological code of these two works, arguing that this framework – integral to Protestantism – is also crucial to the construction of subjectivity under capitalism. Through an analysis of the rhetorical strategies of the Areopagitica and the generic composition of Paradise Lost, Christopher Kendrick demonstrates that Milton’s ‘individualism’ both affirms the success of the Puritan Revolution and also exposes the contradictions between the capitalist subject’s ethical freedom and the world of necessity of which that freedom is part.